Is the final Fallout 3 DLC “out of this world”?
All these pieces of downloadable content for Fallout 3 have been great additions to what was already a brilliant game. It started out a bit rough with Operation Anchorage, but played to the game’s strengths with The Pitt, Broken Steel and Point Lookout. Mothership Zeta is the final addition to the game (at the moment anyway) and seems to sit somewhere in the middle area of quality.
The latest radio broadcast will send you to the crashed spaceship in the Wasteland. I personally don’t actually recall seeing it on my travels through Fallout 3, I’m not quite sure how I missed it but never mind about that. When you approach the ship, you are abducted by the so-called Mothership Zeta and are experimented on. I’m not sure if you are given an anal probe or not, but it doesn’t look pretty…
After all that, you are shoved in a cell with another inmate. After breaking out, you rescue a girl called Lucy and together you unfreeze some other inmates from their cryogenic cells. Scattered across the ship are audio logs which have to be found to unlock one of the achievements, but they have to be found before a certain point of the DLC or you’ll have to load a previous save. After the DLC is over, you can only access a few areas of the ship and there are no other quests.
In total there are 3 new quests with the DLC and they are quite short. Mothership Zeta doesn’t have quite the same feeling to it that past DLC has had. It becomes more of a corridor shooter and hitting a few buttons, blowing up the odd reactor and that’s about it. The end battle against another spaceship felt a little out of place and ultimately was a disappointing end to the episode. On paper, Mothership Zeta sounds like it could be great and it really could have been, but alas it seems that Bethesda forgot what makes Fallout 3 a good game with this content.
I’m not saying it’s all bad. Mothership Zeta looks great, the areas are incredibly detailed and in some cases, pretty random. I guess I was just expecting too much from the final piece of DLC and sadly it fails to deliver when compared with the greater pieces of content that we’ve got so far. The DLC doesn’t take that long to do, even shorter if you are playing on PC and can cheat. The thing that took the longest was hunting down the audio logs, then not being able to access an area and having to reload a past save before the DLC….that was annoying.
The Verdict
Mothership Zeta gives you 3 new missions, some pretty cool weapons and a great sci-fi setting. But it feels like it could have been so much better if it was given more time. I would have gladly waited another month or two if the result was better than what we got. It’s not the worst piece of DLC in the world, but it fails to impress after the great content we’ve seen already.
